Terror leader sabotaged peace deals as he clung to power

He transformed a small band of poorly armed rebels into one of the world's most sophisticated and ruthless insurgencies and then made a string of miscalculations that led his Tamil Tigers to total defeat.

To his followers, Velupillai Prabhakaran, 54, was the heart of a battle to establish a breakaway state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority.

But his many detractors saw him as the brutal ruler of a suicide cult who repeatedly sabotaged peace deals in his pursuit of power.

Over more than a quarter century of civil war, Prabhakaran's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam assassinated top politicians including former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and fought the Sri Lankan government to a near-standstill.

At the height of his power, the portly rebel leader with the bushy moustache and Browning pistol ruled as a virtual dictator over a shadow state of hundreds of thousands of people across northern Sri Lanka.

His guerrilla force was armed with heavy artillery, a rudimentary air force that once bombed Colombo's airport and a navy that consisted of attack craft, boats laden with explosives, crude submarines and huge smuggling ships that plied the Indian Ocean.

The rebels reportedly earned as much as $300 million a year from their arms and drug smuggling. Prabhakaran rarely appeared in public, preferring to communicate in a "state of the nation" address every November.

He alienated his strongest allies in India by sending a female suicide bomber to kill Mr Gandhi in 1991.

Then during negotiations that followed a 2002 ceasefire, he rejected a deal that would have given the rebels broad autonomy over the north and east.

It fell short of total independence but was widely seen as the best deal he could ever get.